{"id":445,"date":"2012-03-01T10:58:30","date_gmt":"2012-03-01T15:58:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steinvox.com\/?p=445"},"modified":"2012-08-11T12:16:37","modified_gmt":"2012-08-11T17:16:37","slug":"pl-experience-requiredscreening-gone-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steinvox.com\/blog\/pl-experience-requiredscreening-gone-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"P&L Experience Required – Screening Gone Bad"},"content":{"rendered":"

P&L experience <\/em>in terms of leadership\u00a0<\/em>is not the ability to create and construct the income statement spreadsheet \u2013 it is the ability to understand an income statement, develop and tune strategy, and execute business decisions that minimize risk while increasing profit. Further, P&L experience is the ability to combine the P&L with other business information, economic indicators, market\/industry and organizational information and produce desirable outcomes. In discussions, ensure common understanding between \u201cassembling the numbers<\/em>,\u201d and \u201cleadership ability to take action based on the numbers<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ProfitLossRiskDecisionOutcomeLg\"<\/a>Many people, and especially anyone with a business degree, or who has earned an MBA, have intensely studied income statements <\/em>(also called profit and loss statements (P&L)<\/em>, revenue statements<\/em>, statement of financial performance<\/em>, earnings statement<\/em>, operating statement <\/em>or statement of operations<\/em>\u00a0by Erich A. Helfert in \u201cFinancial Analysis Tools and Techniques: A Guide for Managers<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Recently I was coaching a colleague of mine who shared a discussion with me that she had with a prospective employer. She was being considered for an executive position over a global services organization by the Senior Vice President of Human Resources. She had done her homework, studied the company, and prepared for the kinds of questions she anticipated.<\/p>\n

The Human Resources screen read from the script and asked the candidate for examples of her P&L experience. My friend continued to outline examples of difficult leadership decisions she had made that involved P&L analysis. She carefully described the situation, the insight that the P&L statement had on the situation, the various options that the P&L analysis presented, and the final decision and action that was taken. She concluded her answer by describing the outcome resulting from her P&L experience<\/em>\u00a0in this example. She said to me that she absolutely hit a home run with her answer.<\/p>\n

As it turned out, the interview was a complete failure \u2013 based solely on that one question.\u00a0 How could that be? This was an experienced executive, had made many difficult decisions resulting in positive outcomes, and she knew how to use income statements to drive business decisions.<\/p>\n

What happened? Why was my colleague passed over for the job? She called later to follow-up, and found the Hiring Manager <\/em>had received comments from the screener <\/em>indicating that “she did not have P&L experience<\/em>.” Further exploration revealed that the screener made this decision because my colleague did not answer the question by \u201cdiscussing how she produced<\/span> the P&L statement spreadsheet<\/em>\u00a0an accounting function<\/span>, not a leadership and decision-making function.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moral of the story here is to ask questions, as a candidate, clarify specifically what the screener wants to know.\u00a0 They may not have the same level of understanding of the business decision making concepts for the role that you do. Second moral of the story, employers must\u00a0make sure that screeners have deeper understanding of screen questions and the acumen to understand the role (spreadsheet creation\u00a0vs. leadership decision-making). This was nothing less than embarrassing for the company, and the story could damage the company’s reputation among other future executive leadership candidates.<\/p>\n

Has a situation like this ever happened to you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

P&L experience in terms of leadership\u00a0is not the ability to create and construct the income statement spreadsheet \u2013 it is the ability to understand an income statement, develop and tune strategy, and execute business decisions that minimize risk while increasing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":447,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[98,11,59,4,7,64,8],"tags":[17,21,86,12,58,42,20],"class_list":["post-445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-collaboration","category-decision-making","category-definitions","category-leadership","category-organization","category-social-responsibility","category-strategy","tag-agile-behavior","tag-alignment-commitment","tag-culture-diversity","tag-design-thinking","tag-disambiguation","tag-failing-learning","tag-results-outcomes"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/steinvox.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/ProfitLossRiskDecisionOutcome.png?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p25ukk-7b","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steinvox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steinvox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steinvox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steinvox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steinvox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steinvox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steinvox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steinvox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steinvox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steinvox.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}